Rule #7: No game suggestion questions and No friend request threads

Other

The mods reserve the right to remove any and all posts and comments at their discretion.

These may include, but are not limited to, posts and comments that are racist, sexist, homophobic, not directly related to PC Gaming, or are overtly troll-ish in nature, especially any "PC Master Race" circle-jerking.

I own and use it, so I do realize how it works and how it is different from Windows 7. Everything I said still stands.

And I rarely use the list of programs in both the start menu and the start screen (tiles) to open a program. Either the program is on my desktop/taskbar or I use search to find it. Other than that, almost every button I need is right there when I open the start menu: shutdown button, user folder buttons, my computer, control panel.

In Windows 8, the start screen does basically nothing for me other than make me use more clicks to shut down and make me change where I want to search (because lack of global search, will be fixed in 8.1). In terms of efficiency for what I want to do, there are either no improvements or there are actually disadvantages, all the while it is less integrated with the desktop than the start menu is.

So no, it doesn't feel fragmented in comparison to Windows 7 because it is different that what I am used to, but it is actually fragmented. The normal start menu acts more like other desktop windows do, while the start screen changes basically everything that Windows explorer has offered and improved upon for well over a decade. And if you want to use a program on the desktop in fullscreen for the hell of it, F11 does that. It basically makes apps in metro pointless, as all you'd have to do is put those apps on the desktop and press F11 when you open them. Same exact functionality except no switching to the start screen, just desktop. Of course with a touch screen, using Metro by itself WITHOUT the desktop very much makes sense.

I agreed with you about the lives tiles thing in another post. Although it is already possible to have things like that on the normal desktop, and I bet Microsoft could even add that functionality to desktops icons.